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Earth: The Operator's Manual - Professor Richard Alley Part 1 · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: What you're about to hear is part one of our interview with Professor Richard Alley.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: Richard Alley is a member of my department here in Penn State University.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: He's a senior member in our department.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: He's an extremely prolific researcher, educator, and a very famous professor at Penn State.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: He's in the National Academy of Sciences.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: He is the Evan Pew University Professor.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: He has won Penn State's Top Teaching Award.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: And as you will hear in this interview, those are all very well deserved.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: So this is part one where we're talking about science communication, really, with Professor Richard Alley.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: Tune in next week to part two, where we will get into some really interesting aspects of glaciers and dive deeper into Richard's research topics.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: You can support us by visiting our website, go to planetgeocast.com backslash support us, and you will find a page there where you can help support Planet Geo.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: And you can find all sorts of other information about who we are, what we're doing here, and past episodes.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: So visit our website, Planetgeocast.com, or find us on all the social medias at Planet Geocast or send us an email.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: Planetgeocast at gmail.com.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: We hope you enjoy part one of our interview with Professor Richard Alley.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: Enjoy.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so we're gonna shift gears here a little bit and talk about um media, I guess in communicating science, because as I said before in the intro, you're an amazing teacher, uh award-winning in all venues at Penn State, but you've also been in the the media space a little bit too.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: You have an IMDB page, which I don't know if I know of another geoscientist who has an IMDB page.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so you've done a lot of stuff, and I think I kind of want to know what's your favorite?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: Which one are you most proud of?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if those are the same question or not, but you've communicated science and your science to a lot of different people, including the Senate and vice presidents.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: What are you most proud of in this space?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I don't know.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it has been very fun.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: It has been been a wonderful opportunity for me, and I've learned so much.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: I probably learned the most going to Greenland for a long weekend with 10% of the Senate.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I I tell this story over and over and over again that when they closed the door on the plane and we headed for Greenland, those ten senators were among the most interesting and interested people I've met.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: They they know a lot, they know how the world works, they want fairly well focused answers, and I might natter on a little too much, but but they were just wonderful people.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: But when the door opened, they're sort of on script, if the press is there.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And partially I think that's because there's no one is so smart that they can in real time ad lib anything in a way that they are confident that their words won't be misused.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you say a million words as a senator and ten of them are wrong, those ten will be on the television uh every 20 minutes until the election.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a very hard thing to do.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the I have to think politics, I have to think what my side is saying, what I've said in the past.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: So they tend to quit being really smart, really interested people looking for solutions, and they become people who are back on script.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's completely understandable, but yeah.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's that's actually I find that kind of heartening, actually.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because I've never known anybody in politics, really met anybody in politics, but I find that heartening that actually behind closed doors, there is solution finding and in you know intelligent nuance stuff happening because it's not just what you see on Twitter, right?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's not just what somebody's saying on Twitter that is actually their thoughts being projected onto Twitter.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I find that in heartening, I guess.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: So that was my my best education, I think.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: My my most fun was doing the PBS mini series.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: So that is the Earth the Operator's Manual, is that?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: The operator's manual, yes.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, give us the the how to give us the backstory behind that and and the pitch, I guess, or sort of a short summary and where to find it, where people can find it too.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: So so backstory, I worked a little bit with a fellow named Jeff Haynes Styles, uh, and Mary De Erna Kuganau.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Jeff did the original Cosmos with Carl Sagan.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: He is a remarkable that they're as a pair, those two are just a remarkable team.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: We were doing something else, and he said, why don't we do a big project and write a book and we'll get some funding and we'll do a big project.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And we worked very heavily on this being solutions-oriented as well as problems-oriented.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: So if we we humans don't deal with climate, we face big problems.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: If we do uh deal with climate, we have these huge, wonderful opportunities to just do great things.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of uh climate problems, and I talked through them and how we know and all of this, but the solution space in that just blows me away.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And they've they found some really great people to talk to.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the section on the Texas ranchers who saved the ranch and they saved the town and they saved the high school because they put in wind energy.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you put five percent of the ranch into roads and and towers and what have you, and 95% of the ranch is ranch, but the the wind pays better than the ranch does, and they call it mailbox money because you go out to the mailbox and you get money out of it.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: We talked to Marines.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: In the Afghan and Iraq wars, uh half or more of the casualties were on fuel convoys, convoys carrying fuel and water.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: A Marine base knows how to protect themselves, they're good at it, but if you have to drive fuel across a country where people can plant improvised explosive devices, it becomes very, very dangerous.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So every time you installed renewable energy in the forward base, you saved lives.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it's that simple.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it really is.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so the the solution space was what was was really fun there.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we just had a ball doing that, and they came up with just some wonderful things.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: I got to go bungee jumping.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's cool.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: What's cool when we're we're filming in caves and then floating out of the cave in in inner tubes, and it was so we had a had a lot of fun doing very interesting things with that.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: It is now available.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you look for my name and earth the operator's manual on YouTube, they're all up there.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: That I mean, that is very, very cool.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: How does one so you know, in the the vein of you are career aspirational for me, how do you get this gig?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's what I'm after.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how do you what do I gotta do to do this?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: Part two or something.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I knew.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: But uh mine was very fortunate because it was I had gotten just enough, you know, appearances that I got asked to be part of this polarpalooza that Jeff Haynes Styles was doing.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then he said, Well, let's do this.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: We sort of hit it off, and so he said, Let's do this.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, we've had other things that we've gotten to do here.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: I helped teach a large course called Geology of the National Parks.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And for that one, uh, when we decided to put it together and put it online, the way we did it, we got a little support from our college, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State, and we got a cause class and the Center for Advanced Undergraduate Studies and Experiences, and we recruited a dozen advanced students, and we got our local PBS affiliate, WPSU, sent over really good people, Tom Keiter and others who taught them how to film, and then we took them to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and they filmed what they were seeing, and we went to Mesa Verde at Arches and Capitol Reef, and and then they filmed and the the students made little film clips as part of their experience, and then we wrapped a course around those.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: WPSU won a regional Emmy for the film showing what the students were doing at the parks.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, there are there are ways.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was a complete hit.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Jesse, I can answer this question too.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, you have to be a very dynamic speaker, you have to like be a top-notch researcher, you have to be extremely smart and personable.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: So you have no shot.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: I know, I know.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is just not gonna happen.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, no, Jesse.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: You guys would be great on the field, you know, and the truth you too would be great, you know, when you get a camera and head off for the no cameras allowed black hills.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: We got Chris here.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: We can't have cameras around.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, so Chris, Chris, can I go?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: I can tell you're ready to go, Chris.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: I can see your the veins coming out of your forehead.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: You're itching to go right now.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, go loose, man.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to go back to a question real quick, Richard.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: That when you took 10 senators to Greenland, was that a committee?
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: Did it span political parties?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: What did that look like?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Just real quick.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was bipartisan.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: You can probably find some record of it in the senatorial records.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was called Codell Boxer, C-O-D-E-L Codell.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then um Senator Boxer from California was the chair.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: We had Senator Michulski, uh, Senator Corker, um, Senator Kloboshar, um, Senator Sanders.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Very, very uh Senator Whitehouse from Rhode Island is married to a marine biologist who's very, very good.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it was bipartisan.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was just absolutely fascinating.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we're we're flying up.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: This this is true.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you go up, we were flying along the front of the the calvin cliff of Yakub Savan Glacier.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And this thing is what you can see sitting above the water is the equivalent of a 30-story high building.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it's 100 meters, so 330 feet.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: What's below is, you know, nine times that.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a really big cliff.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And when you fly along there in the helicopter, there are cracks that are 10 stories high in the front of this thing.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And occasionally it breaks off, and when it breaks off, it makes an earthquake that we can hear in the dike building, and it depends state because it's a magnitude five plus earthquake.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the pilot, actually, this is this is true.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: The pilot says, How close do you want me to get?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's a 10-story cracked.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you went downtown and snuggle up nice and tight to that, we played it.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: I said these are senators, you better move it out of the boy.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, I would have.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: Rich is like, fly right up one of those things.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: And all of a sudden, there's like, no, no, no, no.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: Sidle right up onto that.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, that's a wrap for this week.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: Join us next week for part two with Professor Richard Alley.
• 11:51
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• 11:53
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• 11:54
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• 11:57
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• 12:03
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• 12:09
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• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: Take care.